Question 1. Organizations as Complex Systems. (16 points). Using the 7S model, please identify two S’s that Mr. Nardelli has changed successfully, and two S’s that he has not changed successfully or is having trouble changing successfully (in that he is needing to replace a large number of people, etc. to accomplish the changes). For each, please name the “S” and in 2-3 sentences explain why you say that he has or has not changed the “S” successfully. Home Depot had an enormous growth of achieving $40 billion in revenue in 20 years. However its sales started to stagnate, unable to cope up with the fast growth. Mr Nardelli identified some of the problems, key being appropriate structure and systems to support a strategic growth …show more content…
People were trained to develop subordinate leaders. Power systems – to squeeze out efficiencies out of the core business to fund the new business. An example is centralized purchasing which needs a very strong process and technology backing to consolidate, route, procure and distribute the inventory. Not Changed Successfully 1: Name of the S: Shared Values Explanation: Home Depot had a decentralized and entrepreneurial retail culture that focused on knowledge of the industry, customer service, empowering employees and collaboration. Mr Nardelli converted this culture to a command control and performance focused. The performance was measured by operational efficiency and cost reduction. The decisions were made at corporate and managers had to comply with the strategy. So the need was for people who could execute the decisions mechanically without questioning the management. This is a typical manufacturing culture. Mr Nardelli forced this culture in Home Depot with no knowledge of retail or prevalent culture of Home Depot. A highly fearsome culture was brought in that penalized entrepreneurship and risk taking – huge numbers of people were terminated at executive and managerial level. The experienced senior people were replaced by low wage part timers to cut costs. While wage of employees was not increased,
Home Depot is a leader in the home improvement retailer industry. While many companies are falling behind Amazon and Walmart, Home Depot continues to beat its earnings estimates and attract investors. This part of the report will analyze the core competencies, strengths, and weaknesses of Home Depot to give insight into its recent successes and interpret possible downfalls.
The company likewise has already employed various strategies in order to maintain the high growth rate of the company. However these strategies is soon to reach its capacity to ensure growth. Based on the case as well, what seems to be lacking in the strategies that the company employed before is marketing, control of costs, and
The GM organization has been described as an organization with great culture crisis, the story in the study screams culture problems in the organization where employees are fired, many policy and procedures changes at without prior notice to them. Culture encompasses all the values and behaviors that constitute to a unique socialization which is a component of a healthy working environment for employees (Fullan, M. (2001). Culture greatly influences the organization 's output and performance; it as well provides better guidelines on customer care and service in addition to the concern for the environment.
The Home Depot (Ticker: HD) is the world’s largest home-improvement retailer along with being an American Fortune 50 company. The company operates 2,259 retail building supply/home improvement “warehouse” type stores all across the United States, Canada and Mexico. The Home Depot has over 340,000 team members and is based in Atlanta, Georgia. The average store size is just over 100,000 square feet along with an additional 24,000 square feet set aside for seasonal gardening.
Retailing building supply stores have become a popular retail industry sector due to increased public awareness and the need of many homeowners for the home improvement products. Back in the 1970s, long before warehouse stores ruled home improvement land, do-it-yourselfers shopped at “home centers.” These 30,000 square foot stores offered cheaper prices and wider selection of products, about 25,000 more than local hardware stores and eliminated the extra trip to the lumberyard. The dependence of many of these retailers upon the homebuilding industry for much of their business has also been reduced and the warehouse superstores, such as Home Depot, have become more important. The smaller companies in the
While Lowes has a smaller debt-to-asset ratio (~.64 compared to Home Depot’s ~.69) and a smaller debt-to-equity ratio (~1.76 compared to Home Depot’s ~2.24), the future liquidity and solvency of the company could come into question due to Lowes’s low current ratio, which has consistently trended downward, dropping from ~1.28 to ~1.16, over the past three years.
The economy is the main topic of discussion between neighbors, classmates, the mass media, and the President. Unfortunately, all that is discussed are the negative notes of how much money one lost in the stock market, how homes no longer have the equity it once had, and how some lost a home because of having the current status of consulting and being in between jobs. Because Home Depot is the leading supplier of home improvement building materials and related tools and supplies, the economy has greatly affected the company's revenue and generating lower profits. However, a close watch on market trends will help the company foresee challenges or issues the company might encounter so steps for a successful short-term and long-term goals will
Walmart’s organizational structure determines the company’s business activities. Its organizational structure also enforces limits on how the business discourses its problems. In relation, Walmart’s organizational culture decides the way people react to challenges in the workplace. The elasticity of the human resources of the company partly depends on the mindset maintained through the organizational culture of the Wal-Mart. Nonetheless, the long history of Walmart in progressing successfully and continually growing internationally proves that the firm’s organizational structure and organizational culture have been very positive in bringing competitive advantage and achievement. Such organizational structure interacts with the organizational culture to maintain the significant competitive advantage of Walmart.
However, in 1999, Lowe’s recorded very high sales growth alongside its expansion in preparation for the new millennium. From 1999 to 2001, Lowe’s began to assert itself as a worthy competitor for Home Depot, embodied in its significantly better margins and turnover ratios despite the recessionary economic environment. This improvement in ratios is indicative of positive change in the management of the
Not only is a strong corporate culture good for business by increasing customer satisfaction, it also can help to decrease turnover and save on human resources expenditures. Internal integration should start the minute a new employee enters a company. Training of new employees should include some way of helping them to understand the company's culture. The new hire training program currently in use at Wal-Mart stores includes videos and other information about the founding of the company as well as other general and specific information about the company's culture as well as expectations related to this culture. This is important because a company's culture is not always easily apparent to newcomers and this is what keeps Wal-mart's culture strong (Berg, 2001).
The following pages focus on providing a strategic analysis of Sears Holding Corporation. The introduction reveals the issues that the paper addresses. The Company Presentation section reveals important facts in Sears' evolution. The Strategy Debates Section discusses theoretical issues applied to the situation of Sears. This is followed by the Strategic Decisions section that provides a series of recommendations that can help Sears improve its situation. The Implementation Challenges section provides important issues that can be considered challenges of strategic implementation.
Home Depot 's target market is individual homeowners/small contractors. Even though the traditional ideology is that cost leadership and product differentiation business strategies are mutually exclusive, Home Depot was successful at using a combination strategy. First, Home Depot optimized the cost leadership strategy by offering low and competitive prices to its customers by emphasizing higher sales volumes with lower margins, while instituting a high inventory turnover. Home Depot successfully offered a warehouse product strategy to the individual consumer for the first time. Previously, this type of price discounting was only available to professional contractors who earned product price
Office Depot achieves its strategy by offering products that are less expensive than its competitors. This allows Office Depot to make sales to the largest possible consumer base and yet, at the same, still differentiating itself by providing more of the problem solving, and innovativeness desired by many corporate and some retail customers. Over the past twenty five years, Office Depot has been able to enter into various global locations and develop or maintained its competitive advantage by following this strategy. In fact, this strategy has paid off well over the past several years. Office Depot consistently ranks high in terms of customer recall of office supplies and business solutions. This quantitative measurement may be used by Office Depot to quantify the Company’s growth in this area.
In this short presentation will examine a case study of a failure of organizational management in the decline of the Blockbuster Video Company. We will examine a number of questions surrounding this failure and will generalize these lessons for Blockbuster Video stores in the future as it is run by the Dish Network company. The buyout by Dish Network will provide a case study of what happens when different organizational cultures merge.
A strong foundation for success and growth was already in place in Home Depot under Marcus leadership. The company demonstrated a very strong culture, built on entrepreneurialism and customer service. Abundant promotion opportunities were created due to rapid growth attracting carpenters, plumbers and other building professionals as salespeople. Most of the non-entry-level jobs were filled internally, and from the 400 department heads, just a dozen came from outside the company. Additionally, employee stock